The Battles We Pick

Send us Fan Mail Civic strategist Caitie Whelan's professional mission is to level the playing field of public policy. As she puts it on her website , "If regular folks don’t know how to have a voice in policymaking, lobbyists do. And they are very good at shaping it for their special interests." Caitie's work helping clients climb the learning curve of policy change advocacy m...

Send us Fan Mail The Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center is well known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate and extremist groups. So it was great to have one of their researchers, Hannah Gais, as a guest on the podcast. Discussing her work on White nationalist and Neo-Nazi groups, Hannah told me about the extremist voices and ideas that the MAGA Republicans have wel...

Send us Fan Mail It is often noted that the last time Congress enacted comprehensive immigration reform was in the 1980s. Charles Kamasaki was not only deeply involved in shaping that legislation as an advocate, but he's also written an authoritative history of the effort titled Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die . Kamasaki has for several decades guided the work of  the nation’...

Send us Fan Mail Cornell Law School Professor Sabeel Rahman is coauthor of an important recent book, Civic Power , about the urgent need to revitalize American democracy with much closer links between government and those it's meant to serve. The only path to meaningful equity and true government "by the people" is to engage affected communities as genuine agenda-setting and decisio...

Send us Fan Mail Lolo Cynthia is an African reproductive health activist, social entrepreneur, and experienced communicator . She shared some of the negative experiences that led her to focus on healthy sexuality and talked about how she gets schools to open up to the curriculum on sex and relationships that she developed.  Drawing on what she’s observed about various advocacy efforts, Lolo has cl...

Send us Fan Mail Suzanne Nossel leads the US chapter of PEN, the international network of professional writers dedicated to promoting and protecting the basic right to freedom of expression. Suzanne's book on the subject is titled Dare to Speak: Defending Freedom of Speech for All . Recently she highlighted the broader global struggle between freedom and autocracy in a Foreign Affairs article...

Send us Fan Mail After Tyre Nichols was killed by Memphis Police officers who had pulled him over for a trivial traffic infraction, City Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas "had never seen so many CNN cars and trucks and people in my life trying to see what was the next step for Memphis." With all that interest and scrutiny, colleagues on the Council assembled a package of police reforms...

Send us Fan Mail One interesting angle on advocacy are the effort some people  devote to prodding certain key players to get more involved. In sectors like philanthropy, there can be a reluctance because it seems too political. As founder of the Center for Community Foundation Policy Leadership , longtime criminal justice reform advocate Stephen Saloom has been focused on encouraging and supportin...

Send us Fan Mail First episode back after a hiatus of several months, so I needed a great guest.  Sarah Stachowiak is CEO of the Seattle-based evaluation consulting firm ORS Impact and has been an important role model for me and helped steer me toward becoming an evaluation consultant. Sarah's firm not only does great work for clients, but they provide vital thought leadership through the exc...

Send us Fan Mail This episode features a conversation with our daughter when they were home for Thanksgiving. Sadie is in the early phase of a career in social work, currently working in the University of Arizona's counseling center and planning to begin studies next fall for an MSW. Social workers talk about the micro and macro levels—which translate, respectively, as service provision versu...

Send us Fan Mail This episode's guest is a journalist rather than an advocate, the author of one of the best books focused on advocacy work. Political reporter Sasha Issenberg's The Engagement tells the story of the 25-year fight for same-sex marriage, documenting the various efforts, strategies, course-adjustments, and outcomes from the perspectives of proponents and opponents alike.  S...

Send us Fan Mail Election law attorney Yael Bromberg is principal of her own firm and litigation practice.  With a specialty in student voting rights, she serves as outside counsel to the Andrew Goodman Foundation —which works on college campuses around the country to promote student voting and is legacy of one of the activists murdered in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. Yael teaches el...

Send us Fan Mail To mark the podcast being ten-episodes old, I invited close colleague and good friend Kathleen Sullivan of Fine Gauge Strategies to listen back to some of the most interesting points made by those first ten guests. Similar to the way she and I delve into our interviews for evaluation projects, I wanted to have Kathleen highlight the insights she gleaned from the guests—as well as...

Send us Fan Mail The podcast's tenth episode was a reunion with the former executive director of the group where I was an intern right after college. Richard Healey was executive director of not only the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy but also the Institute for Policy Studies as well as founding director more recently of the Grassroots Power Project . In fact, Richard's...

Send us Fan Mail Clarence Edwards has worked on nearly every side of US foreign policy and politics—from presidential campaign finance to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to lobbying Congress for groups like the Friends Campaign on National Legislation and Bono’s ONE campaign for global treatment and prevention of  HIV/AIDS. Clarence even worked in the Washington embassy of...

Send us Fan Mail In our conversation, Eileen Hershenov of the Anti-Defamation League kept coming back to the theme of advocacy's broadest challenge: to keep progressing and sustaining change over the long haul. As Eileen explained, the only way to sustain progressive organizing is by getting people involved in the effort. Having activists and leaders  who are committed to seeking change is ho...

Send us Fan Mail When Terry Woodbury was fresh out of his masters program at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late-1960s, an internship with a wealthy Kansas congregation—essentially an experiment in changing local racial relations—sent him on a career path as a community organizer. Terry shares his story of facilitating dialogue between Black and White community members in Hutchinson, Kansas...

Send us Fan Mail Sandra Ionno Butcher has been chief executive of the National Organisation for FASD for six and a half years—and active in efforts on behalf of the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder for nearly a decade—after spending the bulk of her career advocating for nuclear disarmament.  With Sandy having lived as an American in the United Kingdom for even longer, it was interesting to get her...

Send us Fan Mail Prior to launching his consulting firm Double Dogwood, Gawain Kripke spent the bulk of his career with Oxfam America, most of that time as policy director responsible for the organization’s advocacy efforts.  That role put Gawain in many different advocacy contexts, including lobbying Congress for measures to help reduce global poverty.  As we discussed on the podcast, it also gav...

Send us Fan Mail Adotei Akwei is a seasoned and accomplished advocate who has worked for the American Committee on Africa, Human Rights First, CARE USA, and spent over 25 years with Amnesty International USA. Currently he is Amnesty's Chief Membership Collaborations Officer. That role with the organization represents a shift—one he sought out—toward movement- / power-building  after many year...

Send us Fan Mail Recently retired teachers union leader Bob Walsh shared many useful insights from his career going all the way back to politics on the college campus where we both went. As a student government leader, Bob was the farthest thing from the Tracy Flick stereotype. He was set on making a positive difference from the outset and learned lessons that he drew on for decades afterward. In...

Send us Fan Mail When George Floyd's horrific murder prompted a reckoning with the America's pervasive racism, a nagging concern had been on Angela Bruce-Raeburn's mind for at least a decade over the racism she saw in the global development field. As a Black American who migrated from Trinidad and Tobago as a child, Angela felt it was time to highlight the problem in her profession...

Send us Fan Mail Elisa Massimino shared reflections from a distinguished career in human rights advocacy, including as CEO of one of the major organizations in the field, Human Rights First. Drawing from her 2020 Drinan Lecture on "Chutzpah and Humility: Twin Virtues for Changing the World" at Georgetown Law Center where Elisa teaches, she talked about the importance of recognizing the r...